PRESS RELEASE

What About Sarkozy's Effort
for New Bretton Woods?

Sept. 25, 2008 (EIRNS)The following statement was released today by Jacques Cheminade, head of the French party Solidarité et Progrès.

I have just heard the speech delivered by Nicolas Sarkozy in Toulon. His diagnosis on the financial and monetary crisis is accurate. For a long-time, I have proclaimed  with Lyndon LaRouche  that a major crisis would shake the world economy, and exposed as madness the idea that the market is all powerful. Thus I appreciate that the President of the Republic should take up what I have stated repeatedly and is telling the truth to the French people. I appreciate that he is denouncing a system that has betrayed the foundations of capitalism and which, in its terminal crisis, is out to put the burden of all the losses onto the backs of the taxpayers and citizens. I'm especially happy that he admits that it is indispensable to go back to the drawing board with the entire financial and monetary system as was done at Bretton Woods, by re-establishing global regulation. Finally, that the right of the nation-state to intervene into financial and monetary matters is recalled, and the need to proclaim that Europe change its rules, echoes affirmations I formulated long ago.

However, there are three points of major disagreement between his thinking and my own.

First of all, he is mistaken in thinking that "the world came within two inches of catastrophe." We are in the midst of the catastrophe, and what the Paulson-Bernanke government has done only aggravates matters by returning to the speculators the ability to reestablish themselves to the detriment of the working people and the real economy. What's on the horizon is well and truly the financier fascism that I denounced during my pre-Presidential campaign. That is the situation we must get out of.

And we can only get out through the emission of public productive capital, decided on by states for joint implementation of great projects. It is, indeed, those great projects which alone can re-equip the world economy and ensure the conditions for peace through mutual development. Nicolas Sarkozy said not a word on that in-depth reform of the financial system or on the need, in order to carry it out, to eliminate the destructive conditions of the Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Lisbon Treaties and to establish another mode of European government than the organized impotence of the Nice Treaty.

Worse, Nicolas Sarkozy, although rejecting any austerity policy, indicated that the borrowing capacity of the state was limited and that therefore spending had to be reduced. This equilibrium theory is false. It is only through this productive public credit, which anticipates that via future development, one can construct the landing strip for takeoff towards that development.

Finally, to say that "everything that could lead to an increase in labor costs would be suicidal" can only mean placing a ceiling on wages, contrary to the very idea proclaimed elsewhere of a capitalism of production.

Nicolas Sarkozy lacks, therefore, the positive economic foundation to outline his justified economic criticism. Beyond that, to think that one can wait until the end of the year to bring a new Bretton Woods into existence, is illusory. The system is doomed. It taking place here and now, despite the fact that the United States is in a "presidential transition" period. It must start right away, by bringing together all the good will in the political world, in order to create a positive chain of events capable of replacing the negative chain of events that we have undergone since August 15th, 1971.